macrumors newbie

macrumors 6502a

I had a similar situation with my 2008 Mac Pro when I owned one. I bought a flashed PC 8800 nvidia card and compared the difference between 2.5 and 5.0 - I did not even see a difference at all to my naked eye.

My guess is that it would be comparing 1066 to 1333 mhz memory - the speed difference is not noticeable to the naked eye.

macrumors 601

I had a similar situation with my 2008 Mac Pro when I owned one. I bought a flashed PC 8800 nvidia card and compared the difference between 2.5 and 5.0 - I did not even see a difference at all to my naked eye.

My guess is that it would be comparing 1066 to 1333 mhz memory - the speed difference is not noticeable to the naked eye.

macrumors 6502a

Who knows? and really who cares? If it doesn't involve me I don't bother with it. But in all my uses of a 2.5 or 5.0 speed on my Mac Pro video cards I don't ever see a difference in performance. Even when I encode video I don't see any difference at all..

I think the SATA II and III sum it up.. No way the bus would be saturated by a regular 7200 SATA HDD, but maybe a few SSD's possibly. I have to climb on board the SSD bandwagon myself, but I can't seem to find a 1TB for under 1000.00 anywhere.

And of course 1080p/25 with 7-1 Surround in MPeg-4 is typically only around 2MB/s max.

So when we start editing uncompressed or layered uncompressed then the speed difference will show up but with MP4 we could potentially do about 100 layers before we needed to concern ourselves with the link speed as a bottleneck.

And what Wiki shows there is about what I experience in the real world as well. I can write about one 8 or 10 bit stream of 1080p/24 or 30 before it starts to choke. And of course the memory bandwidth in the 1,1 and 1,2 is just about the same anyway. If I were editing uncompressed in layers or just doing it a lot I would want the high link speed. Otherwise, eh...

I think the SATA II and III sum it up.. No way the bus would be saturated by a regular 7200 SATA HDD, but maybe a few SSD's possibly. I have to climb on board the SSD bandwagon myself, but I can't seem to find a 1TB for under 1000.00 anywhere.

macrumors 6502a

Thanks for reminder on GT/s—I corrected the original post. Force of habit because I work a lot in optical telecoms where Gb/s in the norm (and GT/s is such an unusual unit)!

I am still hoping MacVidCards might spill the beans on the HD6870, but maybe trade secrets will prevent him.

Looking at the MacVidcards site, it likes to emphasize 5 GT/s advantages, but that is marketing for you. Had I known about them before, I could have gone that route but being outside the US, shipping and customs/import duties add costs I'd rather put into the card instead of government.

macrumors member

Thank you for detailing this! Glad someone spilled the beans so we don't have to spend $280 on a ATI 4870 on rip off bay. Now I can get my card to 5.0. I can easily move a resistor with a soldering iron. If you can't too bad. Send it to MacVidcards for $100.

Hehe... I know the feeling. But I wouldn't begrudge him... That's pretty much how information works these days. And there's no way to cap it that know of... So ya just gotta hope the market you're dealing with is big enough that the do-it-yourselfers don't constitute too big a bite.

In this case I think they totally don't as I doubt more then one or two people will ever touch a soldering iron to their cards for almost a meaningless "upgrade" - though I could be wrong.

macrumors 6502a

The weird thing is MacVidcards makes a huge free contribution to the GPU mac rom scene (thanks) but the company likes to keep the resistor mods secret. I would have guessed (wrongly I suppose) that the rom efi work is much harder than discovering the resistor mods. Perhaps the rom stuff has to be public because netkas is working on it too and he releases publicly, whereas only MacVidCards works on the resistor mods so they keep them proprietary?
I like to do hardware hacks on my own machines but using MacVidCard's work when they are clearly annoyed about it having been disclosed makes me feel very uncomfortable, but even so I have still modded my 4870 and 6870 cards and would mod my GTX680 too if I knew what resistor to move.
If there was some way to make a reasonable payment via Paypal to MacVidcards for this chip mod information so people with the cards, chip resistors, motivation and soldering technique could mod their own cards, I would feel much happier.
Is there any way we could do this?

macrumors member

The weird thing is Rominator makes a huge free contribution to the GPU mac rom scene (thanks Rominator) but the company he is associated with likes to keep the resistor mods secret. I would have guessed (wrongly I suppose) that the rom efi work is much harder than discovering the resistor mods. Perhaps the rom stuff has to be public because netkas is working on it too and he releases publicly, whereas only MacVidCards works on the resistor mods so they keep them proprietary?
I like to do hardware hacks on my own machines but using Rominator's work when he is clearly annoyed about it having been disclosed makes me feel very uncomfortable, but even so I have still modded my 4870 and 6870 cards and would mod my GTX680 too if I knew what resistor to move.
If there was some way to make a reasonable payment via Paypal to MacVidcards or Rominator for this chip mod information so people with the cards, chip resistors, motivation and soldering technique could mod their own cards, I would feel much happier.
Is there any way we could do this Rominator?

Running with 5.0GT/s on ATI(AMD) cards, it needs to move resistor.
On nvidia card, it needs to modify softstraps.(Where to modify softsraps)
softstraps located in 0h0058~0h0077
example for 9500GT:
The first picture is the softstraps of PC card.

If put the card in Mac OS X 10.7 or later, it will show up 2.5GT/s.

The second picture is the softstraps modified for Mac.
It shows up 5.0GT/s if you modify "1E" to "FA".

Same concept for every nvidia card but not same hex value.
If interested in the mod, please find the answer by yourself.
I just offer the hint to let you guys on the correct direction.
Don't always wait for answer from others.
By some reason, they could hide the answer for some purpose.

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